Juliet Rhys-Williams and the Campaign for Basic Income, 1942-55

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Apollo Beveridge’s rival: Juliet Rhys-Williams and the campaign for basic income, 1942-55 Peter Sloman, New College, Oxford Postal address: New College, Oxford, OX1 3BN Email: [email protected] Telephone: 07787 114629 Abstract: Historians of Britain’s post-war welfare state have long been aware of the shortcomings of the social insurance model, but the political impact of the Beveridge report has tended to obscure the alternative visions of welfare canvassed in the 1940s and 1950s. This article examines the social activist Juliet Rhys-Williams’ campaign for the integration of the tax and benefit systems and the provision of a universal basic income, which attracted wide interest from economists, journalists, and Liberal and Conservative politicians during and after the Second World War. Though Rhys-Williams’ proposals were not adopted, they helped establish a distinctive ‘social market’ perspective on welfare provision which has become central to British social policy debates since the 1960s and 1970s. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Ben Jackson, Taku Eriguchi, Bill Jordan, Philippe van Parijs, and Malcolm Torry for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also grateful for valuable feedback from participants at the Women in British Politics conference at the University of Lincoln in May 2011 and the Modern British History seminar at the University of Oxford in January 2015, and from the anonymous Contemporary British History reviewers. 1 Beveridge’s rival: Juliet Rhys-Williams and the campaign for basic income, 1942-55 Historians of the development of Britain’s post-war welfare state have long been aware that they are dealing with a paradox. On one hand, it is clear that the cluster of reforms which made up the 1940s welfare settlement – social security, family allowances, the National Health Service, and the commitment to maintain a high and stable level of employment – embodied a solidaristic and universalist ethos which contrasted sharply with older liberal notions of voluntary action and individual responsibility.1 Yet though its achievements have been considerable, the welfare state has consistently struggled to live up to its rhetoric of inclusive social citizenship. As many scholars have pointed out, the Beveridgean social insurance model at the heart of the post-war settlement is profoundly gendered, being strongly oriented towards the needs of capitalist employment in general and the male breadwinner in particular.2 Partly for this reason, post-war governments have never wholly succeeded in eliminating poverty except on the most restrictive definition. The story of the Beveridge report is a familiar one, first told in detail by José Harris and Paul Addison almost forty years ago, and the reasons for its adoption as the basis of post- war social policy are clear enough.3 Radical in scope yet evolutionary in character, published with all the authority of an official document, and invested with symbolic value by press and politicians, the report quickly came to dominate wartime reconstruction debates. Yet one of the consequences of Beveridge’s success was to cast into the shadows the alternative visions of welfare which were canvassed by contemporaries. Despite a vast empirical and theoretical literature on the British welfare state, we know remarkably little about the roads not taken. This article seeks to illuminate British social policy debates during the 1940s and 1950s by examining one of the most important alternatives to the Beveridge model, namely the campaign for tax-benefit integration and the provision of a universal basic income led by the socialite and political activist Lady Juliet Rhys-Williams.4 Rhys-Williams’ campaign deserves attention for three main reasons. Firstly, her scheme represented a radical response to the problems of poverty and idleness confronted by Beveridge, which drew on similar concepts – universality, contribution, less eligibility, and the national minimum – but configured them in a less gendered and labour-oriented way. Egalitarian and feminist political philosophers such as Philippe van Parijs, Erik Olin Wright, Ailsa McKay, and Almaz Zelleke have been attracted to the idea of an unconditional basic income for precisely this reason: by reducing the importance of paid employment, it makes possible a wider range of life choices and so underpins ‘real freedom for all’.5 Other scholars, such as Tony 1 Harris, ‘Political thought’, Harris, ‘Poor law to welfare state’. 2 Wilson, Women & the Welfare State; Lewis, ‘Gender’; Pedersen, Family. 3 Harris, William Beveridge; Addison, The Road to 1945. 4 I use the term ‘basic income’ throughout this article in the interests of convenience and clarity, though strictly speaking it is an anachronism: it appears to have been coined by G. D. H. Cole in 1953 and only gained wide currency in the 1980s. Contemporaries generally used the term ‘social dividend’, though Rhys-Williams preferred to talk about ‘positive allowances’. Several economists, philosophers, and social policy experts have discussed Rhys-Williams’ scheme on the basis of her published works: see especially Atkinson, Poverty in Britain, 157-84; Kesselman and Garfinkel, ‘Professor Friedman’; Torry, ‘The United Kingdom’, and van Parijs and Vanderborght, Instrument of Freedom. 5 van Parijs, Real Freedom for All; McKay, Future of Social Security; Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias; Zelleke, ‘Feminist political theory’. 2 Atkinson and Stuart White, have suggested that the basic income should be made conditional on some form of contribution to society in order to prevent free-riding.6 Secondly, the reception of Rhys-Williams’ ideas casts important light on wartime and post-war attitudes to work, welfare, and family structure. On the one hand, it is striking how many academics, journalists, and politicians were prepared to contemplate the idea of a basic income; on the other hand, the most important policy-makers remained decidedly hostile. Rhys-Williams framed her scheme as a tax reform and played down its gender implications, but still aroused criticism from those who believed it would subsidize idleness and weaken work incentives. Its failure reminds us both how difficult it was for individual policy entrepreneurs to penetrate the institutions of the British state, and how widely Beveridge’s liberal and male-breadwinner assumptions were shared in Westminster, Whitehall, and British industry. Thirdly, notwithstanding its failure, Rhys-Williams’ campaign helped lay the foundations for a distinctive ‘social market’ approach to the relief of poverty through direct income transfers, which has become increasingly central to British social policy debate since the 1960s and 1970s.7 Not only did Rhys-Williams force Treasury officials to examine the practicability of a basic income, but she also developed a following among liberal economists such as James Meade and Alan Peacock, who saw transfer payments as a market-oriented alternative to collective provision and benefits in kind. The episode thus forms an important prologue to contemporary debates about equality and redistribution and the role of income support policies such as Universal Credit. Juliet Rhys-Williams and the ‘new social contract’ Juliet Rhys-Williams was born in 1898 as Juliette Glyn, younger daughter of the romantic novelist Elinor Glyn and her barrister husband Clayton. From the age of nineteen she worked as a private secretary in Whitehall, and at twenty-two she married Sir Rhys Williams, a South Wales lawyer, coalowner, and Coalition Liberal MP, with whom she had four children.8 During the 1930s, Rhys-Williams became a leading figure in the maternity and child welfare movement as honorary secretary of the National Birthday Trust and the Joint Council of Midwifery, where she helped pave the way for the Midwives Act 1936. The National Birthday Trust was a notably elite organisation, founded by Lady George Cholmondeley to raise funds for voluntary maternity hospitals, but Rhys-Williams persuaded her colleagues to adopt a broader focus on the problems of maternal mortality and malnutrition.9 In 1934 she launched an experimental scheme for distributing food supplements to poor expectant mothers in the Rhondda, which was subsequently extended to other depressed districts in South Wales and County Durham with support from the Special Areas Commission.10 Rhys- Williams also served alongside her husband on the Bishop of Llandaff’s Committee, which investigated the South Wales unemployment problem, and was an active member of Harold Macmillan’s Next Five Years Group.11 Concern about malnutrition and work incentives 6 Atkinson, ‘Case for a participation income’; White, The Civic Minimum. 7 I owe this conception of a ‘social market’ approach to welfare to Alan Peacock: see Peacock, ‘Welfare philosophies’. 8 For a short biography see Nicoll, ‘Williams, Dame Juliet Evangeline Rhys’. Sir Rhys changed his surname to Rhys-Williams by deed poll in 1938. 9 Williams, Women & Childbirth. 10 Ibid., 74-98; Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood, 181-2. 11 Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS. Macmillan dep. c. 375, fols. 185-7, minutes of Next Five Years Group general policy committee, 21 Apr. 1936. 3 pushed her towards a universalist view of welfare, and when she fought the safe Labour seat of Pontypridd as a Liberal National candidate in a February 1938 by-election she emphasized her support for family allowances, cheap milk, and

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